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Friday, October 6, 2017

Jay Whitehead

Whitehead in 1977

Anybody familiar with the US chess scene in the 1970s probably
remembers the Whitehead brothers, Jay and Paul. Jay, born in 1961 in
New York, was the stronger of the two and was headed towards the GM
title, but gave up active play before reaching his prime and started
researching old chess games, playing backgammon and living a Bohemian existence. He spent 20 years doing historical
research and collecting games prior to 1867 which he recorded in
a database. Awarded the
IM title in 1986, Whitehead was a US Junior Champion, a Grand Prix champion, frequent competitor in the Lone Pine tournaments
of the 1970s and played in the US Championship in 1983 and 1987. The Whitehead family allowed Bobby Fischer to “hideout” in their home in San Francisco back in the early 1980s. In the 1983 US championship he finished in tenth place out of 14,
scoring +2 -4 =7. The 1983 event was held at Thiel College in remote
Greenville, Pennsylvania and the 23-year old Yasser Seirawan, the top
rated US player and already a veteran of European tournaments, had a hissy fit.
Seirawan wrote the USCF asking for more money as an appearance fee,
better publicity and living conditions. He
wrote that the best US players should not be "living in
dormitories and eating cafeteria food.” The USCF refused and so
Seirawan didn't play. The tournament began during a heat wave and
there was no air conditioning in the dormitories. Whitehead, the
reigning US Junior Champion, lost to 19-year old Joel Benjamin in the
second round in what turned out to be a brilliancy prize game.

Looking down Main Street in Greenville

The 1987 Championship was held in Estes Park, Colorado for the third
time in as many years. Whitehead again did not finish well. This
time he scored +3 -6 =4 and finished in twelfth place out of 14. The
highlight of this tournament was that after the final night of
partying someone trashed a hotel room as if they were a rock star,
even damaging wooden banisters. It was the last tournament held in
town. Around 1984 Whitehead joined the Hare Krishna sect and would often
appear at tournaments in flowing robes, but
he quickly became a member of a dissident group. The founder of the Hare
Krishna religion, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Prabhupada was eventually murdered, but I am not sure by whom. Whitehead wrote
several articles about the murder which Sam Sloane published on his
website. Sloane wrote that in 2006 Whitehead sent him a desperate
email asking him to remove Whitehead's name from the article, but to
keep the article on the site. Swami Prabhupada (September 1, 1896 – November 14, 1977) was a
spiritual teacher and the founder of the International Society
for Krishna Consciousness, commonly known as the Hare Krishna
Movement. Before adopting the life of a guru in 1950, he was married
with children and owned a small pharmaceutical business. As the
founder of the Hare Krishna Movement he emerged as a major figure in
Western counterculture and thousands of young Americans joined the
group. In the mid-1960s he traveled throughout the US and devotees
established temples in New York and San Francisco. It has been
rumored that the Swami may have been murdered by his close associates whom he allegedly began to criticize as being corrupt. One site that
referred to him as a world-famous saint, cultural ambassador,
scholar, social reformer claims that he had warned in a letter dated
September 1970 that “the great sinister movement ( i.e. the
Illuminati] is within our Society” and they were after him. It was
alleged that in 1977 he was held in a small room and slowly tortured
and poisoned to death by the agents of this sinister movement which
the site identified as "Jews and Satanic Zionists." Who knows, but apparently Whitehead had some thoughts on the matter. Jay Whitehead died in the Zen Hospice Guest House in San Francisco after a
long battle with cancer on October 4, 2011. Here is an exciting and complicated tactical game he played against Michel Wilder at Lone Pine in 1980.